Using Automation To Enhance Not Replace The Workforce

Seismic technology innovations continue to offer companies both opportunities and risks, and many in the workforce feel the stakes are higher than ever before.

The first industrial revolution of the 1800s brought the automation of textile mills and factories.iStock

Will workforce automation raise needless anxiety for top executives? Or will it unlock dynamic growth by empowering workers to reach new heights of innovation and productivity? To answer, company leaders should remember what has driven their past success, while also rapidly evaluating intelligent automation innovations like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. They will see these advances might help—and complement—their businesses moving forward.

Intelligent automation is already changing the way many companies operate, from the simple smarter expense report all the way to the complex deployment of AI and machine learning to reimagine how businesses interact with customers. As technology becomes smarter, it learns from human behavior. When applied effectively, it has the potential to transform a company’s workforce. Technology won’t replace humans, but it can make us all more productive, efficient and happier—a concept that many companies have yet to fully embrace.

A cycle of innovation

Workforce transformation has echoes in history. The first industrial revolution of the 1800s brought the automation of textile mills and factories. While the work landscape changed, the net effects were more and different jobs and an improved standard of living. Similarly, agriculture made up 40 percent of the U.S. economy a century ago; today it is about 2 percent. New technologies created new opportunities.

Paradigm-changing technologies like AI have a long track record of creating knock-on innovations and economic advances that no one imagined. Consider how people almost 150 years ago originally saw electricity very specifically as a way to power the light bulb for the masses. But with the establishment of the grid, the potential of electricity extended to areas unimaginable at the time, from washing machines to televisions to electric vehicles that are now ubiquitous just two decades later.

Now, AI is the electricity of our generation with the potential to spread to nearly every aspect of business: strategic planning to product development to customer service to cybersecurity.

Today’s most advanced technologies differ from those of the past because they have the ability to learn. Employees and their companies’ leaders should consider this capability an opportunity. If they can train an AI application to handle time-draining tasks—such as completing expense reports and comparing or formatting data—they can focus their daily work on the more skilled tasks that require human sensitivities, such as providing insights and using ingenuity to make decisions and create. And as an added bonus, these human-centric tasks are often those that provide greater job satisfaction and a more desirable work environment.

Intelligent, interactive technologies can also vastly improve a company’s customer experience by making always-on access a reality. AI can eliminate 30-minute holds for a customer service rep, for example, by siphoning off simpler inbound queries while also prioritizing the more complex calls that require human interaction.

The ability of AI to consume and analyze massive quantities of data from many different sources empowers humans to make business decisions with better precision and clarity—decisions that can affect areas such as product design and development, internal business processes and customer support.

Ethical considerations

The way a company incorporates intelligent automation into business processes mirrors who they are. AI learns from human direction, so companies must make sure its human employees provide direction that is consistent and repetitive—and not misguided. AI aggregates and reflects on all the data it is given, through social media, images, videos and other information we allow it to observe. Company leaders should be mindful of the possible ethical concerns that can arise.

Companies should also be wary of humanizing AI applications. They enhance the workforce, but they do not replace it—they should not become the face of the company to customers. As AI becomes smarter and more deeply embedded in all aspects of a business, this will become more difficult. Establishing strong governance for these technologies is essential. Ultimately, the focus must not simply be on “automation,” it must be on intelligent automation.

The right automation plan is different for every company. Given the rapid advancements in intelligent automation, every company has an obligation—to their employees and their customers—to explore what automation could mean to them, and then make an informed decision of when, where and how to invest. Because, likely, their competitors are doing the same.